KIRKUS REVIEW

Three girlfriends across the pond navigate the roller coaster of sex, love and life in this entertaining chick-lit debut.

If Sex and the City had taken place in London with a trio of spirited black women, it might look something like the adventures of Coco, Chama and Tasha. Three friends from university, they meet for weekly gossip sessions at their favorite bistro, but lately there has been trouble in girlfriend paradise. Chama, now a deeply religious, doting wife, harshly judges her friends. Tasha has devoted herself to a spiritual path of meditation, yoga and her spirit guide, Pam, becoming a whimsical hippie in the process, much to Chama’s and Coco’s chagrin. And Coco, the Louboutin-wearing, Beamer-driving editor of Chocolate magazine, may have ruined her marriage when she was caught hooking up with an old flame. While Coco gets cut off from her wealth, Chama struggles to get her husband sexually interested in her again, and Tasha realizes that her boyfriend, Kerin, is cheating on her. Instead of leaning on each other for help, the women dig themselves into a deeper mess. In order to survive each of the problems they’ve found, Coco, Chama and Tasha discover that they have to drop the attitudes, speak the truth, and show up for one another. It may take a lot of confessions, a few tropical drinks and one late-night heist, but nothing will stop these women from ending up on top. Told in alternating chapters from three points of view with more interior monologue than storytelling, the novel bounces along, delighting in the conversational tone of each woman’s personality. Their voices have built-in asides, breaking the text every few paragraphs, whether it’s Tasha’s meditation chants, Chama’s religious Scriptures or Coco’s sarcastic rebuttals. The asides can be a bit distracting from the plot that’s trying to unfold, yet every chapter works hard to end on a note of suspense. Since the women are drawn as such extreme characters, there’s an air of disbelief that they’d all be such good friends, but the novel rolls forward with a good sense of humor, lots of sex talk and a fair amount of fashion. While it’s not the most original plot, it’s refreshing to see women of color at the forefront of a fun chick-lit novel.

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